3rd ACRE Workshop

Autonomous robotics in agriculture is coming of age, and both research and industry are involved. Their fruitful collaboration requires reliable methods of assessing the performance of systems and subsystems: in a nutshell, objective benchmarks.

ACRE, i.e., the Agri-food Competition for Robot Evaluation, is an agricultural robot benchmarking initiative funded by the EU Commission as part of the H2020 project METRICS. In ACRE, real-world agricultural tasks are used as benchmarks for quantitative and reproducible performance evaluation. Special attention is given to the task of autonomous weeding, to which robotics brings an entirely new approach. ACRE adopts the concept of benchmarking through competitions to act as a demonstrator and testbed for advanced robots and smart implements.

On February 23rd, 2022, from 10:00 to 11:30 (UTC+1), ACRE organizes an online workshop to present the METRICS project and the ACRE Competition. This 3rd ACRE workshop intends to:

• Describe the METRICS project and the upcoming ACRE competition events
• Illustrate the benchmarks for the forthcoming 1st Field Campaign in June 2022 (please find more information in the attached leaflet)
• Collect feedback and expressions of interest in attending the 2022 1st Field Campaign as participants, exhibitors, visitors, or sponsors.
• Launch of the 1st Cascade Campaign, a data-driven challenge for researchers in AI, Computer Vision, and Robotics that will take place online from February 23rd, 2022 to May 23rd, 2022.

Researchers, companies, and forward-looking policymakers are warmly invited to attend the ACRE online Workshop. The Workshop will take place on the Zoom platform and will be streamed live on YouTube. The links to access the Zoom room and watch the YouTube live streaming will be sent to you the day before the Workshop.